the more time I spend alone and quiet in the truck the weirder my speech gets. It's scared to poop, kinda a shorthand of being so scared you poop. I have no idea where I learned it or if I mangled it myself.

Looking for Knowledge wrote:

When drunk.....I want to have sex, but find I am more likely to be shot down than when I am sober.

You guys ever open a can of food with what should be a good date but it's rotten anyway. Today I opened some soup, thought it tasted like spoiled milk, had to do some stuff real fast, and when I got back in the horribly rotten smell finally hit me. Needless to say that soup fed the grass.

Last edited by Heiwashin on Fri Aug 11, 2017 4:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Looking for Knowledge wrote:

When drunk.....I want to have sex, but find I am more likely to be shot down than when I am sober.

I believe the pH of tomato paste is too low for Clostridium botulinum. Still not something you want to mess with.

Home canners need to acidify anything tomato-based, as they are a low-acid food and need the acid to kill the spores in standard boiling canning pots. Anything low-acid canned commercially is stuffed into a pressure cooker and brought up to 250F, which is enough to kill the spores that survive everyday boiling.

I believe the pH of tomato paste is too low for Clostridium botulinum. Still not something you want to mess with.

Home canners need to acidify anything tomato-based, as they are a low-acid food and need the acid to kill the spores in standard boiling canning pots. Anything low-acid canned commercially is stuffed into a pressure cooker and brought up to 250F, which is enough to kill the spores that survive everyday boiling.

Ahh, OK. I just figured they were acidic enough on their own. I stand corrected!

Getting ready to head to the CHAOS Summer BrewBQ in the city. Pouring some of my own beer and mead at this event.

Exhausted, but had a really good time. Will go again next year if they do it again.

My wife and I got stuck hauling all of our homebrew club's gear and kegs back out to the 'burbs by virtue of being the last club members there though... which means I get to clean all of the tap lines on the draft system so they don't grow mold. Not doing it tonight... it can wait until tomorrow. At least they'll be clean (we've had issues after past events with stuff not getting cleaned up).

Yup. Club next to us (of which we are also members, but weren't responsible for any of the draft equipment at this event) discovered that they had a trashed CO2 regulator and moldy gas lines. Not sure how you even get mold in your gas lines, since nothing is ever supposed to touch those except CO2. Previous user must've had a major malfunction... and by malfunction, I mean brain fart. A real "Hold my beer and watch this!" moment.

Always check your equipment! Even if other people haven't used it, stuff still goes wrong. Tanks and lines can leak, fittings get damaged by getting swung around or stuff set on top of them, o-rings and washers can get lost/misplaced, etc...

Gah, how I hate these conference gigs. At least in small classes the people ask intelligent questions, but the abject stupidity emanating from the mouths of people who are ostensibly banking field examiners is simply brain-numbing.

Another zero-cost woodworking project(mostly) completed. This time it's a kitchen prep area/cutting boards/serving trays from mahogany and maple.

At first it was a tabletop about the same length of both boards, but wider that I built in order to upgrade a store bought kitchen stand. At that point the maple and mahogany were in more equal proportions. Then I moved it onto the counter as the kitchen prep area. Then I decided I wanted to reclaim some of the maple for other projects, so I did. I need to add some feet in order to lift the boards up a bit off the surface of the counter, and I want to add some cutouts on the bottom to make picking up the boards a bit easier.

And yes, I love cookies.

Do not meddle in the affairs of archers, for they are subtle and you won't hear them coming.

Gotta say, this is one of the better cheap gadgets I've bought at the local Harbor Freight. The loud "pop" (and the whiff of ozone) indicating a successful kill is quite satisfying. The large surface area also makes aim less critical for us old farts with lousy eyesight; just flail around in the general area where you hear the fly buzzing and you'll be reasonably effective.

There was a sotto voce rebellion in my corner of the auditorium during today's presentations. We're all "experienced" examiners (i.e. we're old enough to know to get to conferences early on the first day to get a seat in the back corner close to the door) and, since this is a Federal thing, we all have binders full of paper copies of all the slides (meh, trees grow back). In the break between presentations we'd each wager a quarter on which slide in the upcoming presentation would be the first to generate a truly idiotic question (there's a core of 4-6 dolts who can't help themselves and revel in exposing their idiocy to a room of 130 examiners). I haven't yet won, but none of today's wagers got into double-digit slide counts.

The idiocy call can come from anyone in the betting group, and it's the Shawshank "we have a winner"; delivered quietly, of course. IOW, BS Bingo adapted to my particular slice of work life, though the BS here actually carries some intellectual stank on it. The "dolts" are Millennials or younger and every single question they ask can be reduced to "how can I reduce my inherently purely subjective job into a yes/no checklist so that I never have to make a decision for myself so I can never be wrong and I will always have a perfect record and a 4.00 GPA and why am I not already senior management".

I've run into this with our newest hire. She's a Millennial, she got lots of participation trophies and grade inflation. She wants black/white with a preapproved checklist of what's black and what's white because she has this irrational fear that if she gets even one small thing wrong she'll be fired, so she wants her decisions pre-made. I've spent the last two years trying to reassure her that in our line of work we simply can't look at everything and, even in the things we do look at, we'll miss some things. I tell her that, given the on-site time constraints, the chances that I've either missed something or misread something in every on-site exam approaches 100%, yet she still has this existential fear/dread of being "wrong", perhaps for the first time in her life. She simply has never faced a situation where gray is not only in play but is the order of the day and she has severe issues dealing with the gray.

I am Gray, I stand between the candle and the star. We are Gray, we stand between the darkness and the light.